Chapter Forty-Four - Suicidal Defence

Day’s drones didn’t have any difficulty slipping into the ERF Postmaster. The ship had plenty of holes that made access easy.

The repair drones flew out towards the engine bay, the reactor room, and towards engineering. Day didn’t have high hopes for the technology she was seeing, but it wasn’t impossible that she’d find something interesting.

The rest of her focus turned towards tracing the ship’s computational systems back to its AI core.

Day’s own core was a distributed network, very much unlike what a modern human ship would have used. It meant that while she might lose some processing power and maybe some of her unstored memories on a hard impact or in an attack, she wouldn’t ‘die’ until the last core went down.

The ERF Postmaster, she suspected, was a very different story.

The interior of the ship was a grave.

Unlike Day or her siblings, the inside of the Postmaster obviously needed room for its occupants. That meant dozens of tight, narrow corridors, with airlocks all over often leading into small rooms. Locker rooms, washrooms, kitchens and dining rooms. Bunks for the crew to sleep in and two separate bridges. Then there were cargo spaces and maintenance access passages designed to allow a human to pass instead of just a small repair drone or two.

The ship didn’t show any signs of violent decompression. They’d likely vented their air before any fighting began. That didn’t save the crew that were left.

She gently moved the bodies she found towards one of the larger airlocks. They were all wearing suits, though some had had their suits punctured or ripped apart. Those whose suits were still intact had rotted within their own uniforms. Day catalogued the names and placed them down as respectfully as she could.

Her drones reached the bridge, where the screen-covered walls were covered in pin-prick holes.

The Main bridge was built as a slight protrusion above the rest of the ship, and it had clearly been a target for plenty of particle cannon fire. The captain was dead in his seat.

Day moved his hand aside and connected into the ship’s computer. She had to use some of her drone’s batteries to power the ship up enough to get the computer running. Its reactors had shut down and its batteries had drained a long time ago.

Day dove into the ship’s systems, rammed through its feeble firewall, then started to search.

First, she located the ship’s AI core. It was near the centre of the ship, and was surprisingly located in a part of the vessel that hadn’t been too damaged. Lucky. The core was offline, of course, and from the logs it had shut down within minutes of the fight starting.

The crew had had to fight without AI support.

Day winced. Several of the guns had been aimed more or less manually by the gunnery crew.

She poked at the logs some more and pulled out a more concise history of what the ship had been through.

The ERF Postmaster was stationed around Mars orbit when the Accord arrived for the second time. There had been discussions, Day imagined, that she didn’t have access to at the moment. Then the Postmaster and five corvettes slipped out of Mars’ orbit and burned towards the Accord to meet the incoming fleet.

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A stalling action, and one which clearly didn’t work as planned.

The Accord fleet split, half of it moving one way, the other aiming straight for the Postmaster and her accompanying corvettes. One Accord destroyer and three corvettes versus a frigate and five corvettes.

The ERF Katzbalger was the first to go down, cored through by particle cannon fire. The two small fleets entered closer-engagement range, but by then it was already nearly over. The Accord ships had fired dozens of volleys of particle cannon fire, and even if the human ships dodged most of it... well, the Postmaster couldn’t dodge hard, not with an organic crew susceptible to that kind of thing within.

The AI core went down just as they entered medium-close and the Accord let loose with their missiles.

The ERF ships fought back, of course. They had torpedoes and point defence of their own. The ERF Sgian Dubh and ERF Bagh Nakh went down next, but the latter took out an Accord corvette with one of its torpedoes.

The ERF Karambit actually made it through the missile fire nearly unscathed and then raked the Accord destroyer with point-defence fire, its multiple Gatling guns unloading into the side of the ship.

It got lit up by Accord laser fire for its troubles and went spinning off into empty space.

The last ship, the ERF Sicarii, flanked around another Accord corvette and put a few good rounds through it, but then it ate a handful of missiles and was ruined.

And then the Accord fleet and the remains of the human one flew past each other.

The ERF Postmaster got struck by a few more missiles, but that seemed to be it.

Its own guns had fired only a handful of times, and never landed a shot.

Most of the crew was dead already. The impacts had thrown any of them who weren’t secured around hard enough to kill. Some had been struck by passing particle rounds or were caught in a wash of ionising energy and burned. Those in the compartments hit by missiles... Day would try to retrieve what she could for burial.

The few who had survived though, ended up gathering in a shuttle. There were seven of them. She didn’t know where they went, or what they found once they got there.

From a ship that started with a complement of a hundred and twelve.

She finished extracting the AI core, a task made easy by the ship having access ports to reach the core to service it.

“Found anything good?” Twilight asked.

“One intact core,” Day said as she sent more drones in to grab the core. It was a metre-long cylinder covered in thick lead plating. “How about you?”

“One slightly-slagged Corvette, actually,” Twilight said. “Hey, this one seems... dated, but kind of fixable.”

“Oh?” Day asked.

There might be potential there.

***